On Page 84 of the ravishing new book "At Work: The Art of California Labor, " a grape picker in a Pirkle Jones photograph looks out at the viewer from the depths of Napa County in 1956, in his features no hint that Lake Berryessa will soon inundate the valley around him.

Just in time for Labor Day -- an observance with a sadly underdeveloped gift-buying tradition -- "At Work" performs a salvage operation on the too often submerged legacy of photography, painting, sculpture, printmaking and even literary art about making a living in California. The book pays respectful tribute to the laborers who made possible the state's glory years, some of whom never got paid much else.

"At Work" also dignifies those other manual laborers, the artists themselves -- many of whom still walk under-recognized among us today. Former California Labor School professor Robert McChesney is 90 and still painting at his home on Sonoma Mountain, above Petaluma; his still timely 1948 illustration about xenophobic American foreign policy, "A Specter Is Haunting Europe," could have been inked this morning.

The California Labor School wasn't an art movement, by the way. It was an actual school for laborers, underwritten not only by trade unions and the Communist Party but also by endowments from the Crocker, Strauss, Giannini and Hallinan families, as "At Work's" knowledgeable editor, Mark Dean Johnson, admiringly points out.

The school's faculty appears in a jaunty caricature by Pele deLappe, whose work is also represented by "Uptown Picket Line," her lively protest against a Fillmore district movie house that catered to black workers but refused to hire any. Not much younger than McChesney, deLappe, too, is still active in the North Bay.

"At Work" doesn't slight the work of better-known California artists. Dorothea Lange's photography appears more than once, including the wartime masterpiece "Kaiser Shipyard -- Shift Change 3:30," which her colleague Ansel Adams amusingly tries to take credit for in an accompanying caption.

A recurring motif is the interrelationship among California labor artists --

not just professional but familial. Lange's first husband, Maynard Dixon, appears via "Free Speech," his somber, haunting canvas of a union activist addressing a mixed crowd of workers and wary policemen.

The book's cover features Diego Rivera's amazing "Allegory of California" mural for the Pacific Stock Exchange, which depicts the "goddess of California" cradling, among other figures, a boy modeled on the young Peter Stackpole. One of the grown-up Stackpole's classic photographs of workers building the Bay Bridge turns up in the book, too, as does his slyly funny shot of a screenwriter in a sauna cabinet. And Stackpole's father, Ralph, appears via his granite sculpture "Bountiful Earth," which still stands outside the building at Pine and Sansome that houses his friend Rivera's mural.

The accompanying text for "At Work" isn't always up to the high standard set by its artists. The caption for Stackpole's "Building the Bay Bridge," for example, includes a sentence that reads, "The Bay Bridge construction was especially gripping, as a dozen workers fell to their deaths from great heights in high winds." Somehow, "gripping" doesn't seem adequate to such a sacrifice, nor does relegating the death toll to a parenthetical-sounding "as" clause.

But these are mere annoyances, like buzzing fluorescent lights on what's otherwise a dream job. The subject of concurrent exhibitions opening next week at the San Francisco State UniversityFine Arts Gallery and the California Historical Society, "At Work" will honor the labor that went into making any coffee table it rests on. It's a dignified celebration of all those for whom five days a week are labor days.

SF Labor Festival: A picnic and day of music featuring Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeno Band, Holly Near, Utah Phillips and
Linda Tillery
, among others, will be held from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday at Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission and Third streets, San Francisco. For more information, call (415) 543-1718 or log on to
www.sflabordayfestival.org
.

At Work: The Art of California Labor: Works appearing in the book will be on exhibit Monday through Dec. 20 at the California Historical Society, 678 Mission St., San Francisco, and Tuesday through Oct. 11 at the Fine Arts Gallery in the Fine Arts Building at San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave., San Francisco. For more information call (415) 357-1848 or (415) 338-6535 or log on to www.californiahistoricalsociety.org.